Not-for-Profit Publishers Commit to Providing Free Access to
Research

On March 16, 2004 representatives from the nation’s
leading not-for-profit medical/scientific societies and publishers
announced their commitment to providing free access and wide dissemination
of published research findings. The Washington DC Principles for Free
Access to Science outlines the commitment of not-for-profit publishers
to work in partnership with scholarly communities such as libraries to
“ensure that these communities are sustained, science is advanced,
research meets the highest standards and patient care is enhanced with
accurate and timely information.” The DC Principles provide
what has been called the needed “middle ground” in the increasingly heated
debate between those who advocate immediate unfettered online access to
medical and scientific research findings and advocates of the current
journal publishing system. The document was drafted in response to
recent claims that these publishers’ practices hinder the public’s ability
to access published scientific research.

(March 16, 2004) -
Washington, DC – As scholarly, not-for-profit publishers, we reaffirm
our commitment to innovative and independent publishing practices and to
promoting the wide dissemination of information in our journals. Not-for-profit
scientific, technical, and medical publishers are an integral part of the
broader scholarly communities supporting scientists, researchers, and
clinicians. We work in partnership with scholarly communities to ensure that
these communities are sustained and extended, science is advanced, research
meets the highest standards, and patient care is enhanced with accurate and
timely information.

We continue to support broad access to the scientific and
medical literature through the following publishing principles and practices.

1. As not-for-profit publishers, we see it as our
mission to maintain and enhance the independence, rigor, trust, and visibility
that have established scholarly journals as reliable filters of information
emanating from clinical and laboratory research.

2. As not-for-profit
publishers, we reinvest the revenue from our journals in the support of science
worldwide, including scholarships, scientific meetings, grants, educational
outreach, advocacy for research funding, the free dissemination of information
for the public, and improvements in scientific publishing.

3. As not-for-profit publishers, we have introduced
and will continue to support the following forms of free access:

Selected important articles of interest are free online
from the time of publication;

The full text of our journals is freely available to
everyone worldwide either immediately or within months of publication,
depending on each publisher’s business and publishing requirements;

The content of our journals is available free to
scientists working in many low-income nations;

Articles are made available free online through reference
linking between these journals;

Our content is available for indexing by major search
engines so that readers worldwide can easily locate information.

4.We
will continue to work to develop long-term preservation solutions for online
journals to ensure the ongoing availability of the scientific literature.

5. We will continue to work with authors,
peer-reviewers, and editors for the development of robust online and electronic
tools to improve efficiency of their important intellectual endeavors.

6. We strongly support the principle that publication
fees should not be borne solely by researchers and their funding institutions,
because the ability to publish in scientific journals should be available
equally to all scientists worldwide, no matter what their economic
circumstances.

7. As not-for-profit publishers, we believe that a free society allows
for the co-existence of many publishing models, and we will continue to work
closely with our publishing colleagues to set high standards for the scholarly
publishing enterprise.